W.E.B. Du Bois: “Who nursed them in crime and fed them on injustice?”

I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy.

Fully ninety-four per cent have struggled for land and failed, and half of them sit in hopeless serfdom.